The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity by Jeffrey D. Sachs, Random House, 2011, 324 pages. Hardcover, $27.

Every president since Reagan, including Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, promoted those policies. Most enjoyed close relationships, and financial support, from Wall Street and its top bankers.

To meet today's challenges -- including economic globalization, disastrous environmental changes and rising costs of health care -- we might need to change our government.

If House of Representatives members did not have to run for re-election every two years, it could reduce the dominant role corporations play in almost all elections and congressional debates.

Whether you agree with him or not, Jeffrey D. Sachs offers a variety of eye-opening critiques and bold solutions to our country's problems in his new book, "The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity."

Sachs, director of the Columbia University's Earth Institute, is also a special adviser to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Sachs criticizes the increasing concentration of wealth at the top of American society and urges restoring higher tax rates on the wealthiest. The first step should end George W. Bush's tax cuts for households with annual incomes above $250,000.

 "The Price of Civilization" strongly supports the right of individuals to accumulate wealth, but stresses the social responsibility to help others.

"No class war is needed or intended," Sachs writes, praising business leaders from Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who financed public libraries and medical research centers in the late 1800s, to Bill Gates, Warrant Buffett and George Soros today.

Our country also needs a "credible third party" to counter the corrupt "duopoly" between Republicans and Democrats, Sachs argues.

Today, Sachs believes, both parties are "right of center" and "hew to a fairly narrow range of policies, and not the ones that are solving America's problems."

Both parties have failed to take any action to cut federal deficits.

Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, Sachs points out, were central actors in the 2008 financial crisis. Yet those firms were "the very places to which Obama turned to staff the senior economic posts of his administration. ...

"The bankers who brought down the world economy remain at the top of the heap."

The federal government did little to control huge salaries and bonuses collected by leaders of those banking conglomerates, in part because of the money they spent to finance campaigns of political leaders.

The three other industries with the most political lobbyists today are the military-industrial complex, Big Oil companies and health care -- particularly pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

Poor and working people lose influence

One result of increasing power wielded by lobbyists and corporate executives is that poor Americans "are typically not wooed and are often not even mentioned in the campaigns, since they are rarely the swing votes," Sachs writes.

During the three 2008 presidential debates between Obama and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., neither candidate mentioned the words "poor" or "poverty" even once.

Sachs traces the beginning of the major transition in American society -- from the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal -- to the presidency of Jimmy Carter, between 1977 and 1981.

Carter began deregulation, labor unions started losing their political influence and the country saw a shift of political power from the Snowbelt to the Sunbelt in the Deep South in those years.

Manufacturing industries, such as textiles, began fleeing the North to the non-union South.

Beginning in 1981, the four main components of the "Reagan Revolution," Sachs writes, were: tax cuts on higher incomes, cutting federal money for civilian programs while boosting military spending, deregulating industries and outsourcing government services to private companies.

Today, contrary to widely expressed criticisms of "liberal" federal power by groups like the tea party, poor Southern states tend to get the most federal funds for every dollar their residents pay in taxes.

"The Price of Civilization" offers a wide array of revealing and provocative statistics about changes in American and world societies.

* Between 1998 and 2009, the United States lost two million jobs in industries including computers and televisions, textile and shoes, furniture and toys.

* Shenzhen, a Chinese coastal city, grew from a fishing village of 20,000 people in 1975 to a manufacturing city of 9 million by 2010 -- reflecting the spectacular growth of low-wage industrial jobs in that country.

* In the United States, federal corporate taxes dropped from 3.8 percent of the annual Gross Domestic Product in the 1960s to 1.8 percent of the GDP in the 2000s.

Sachs also criticizes individuals for the declining levels of their interaction with other people, which hurts both mental and physical health.

Television, and today's increasing use of computers and hand-held devices, "shifted the center of society from the public park and the bowling alley to the privacy of our own homes, as couch potatoes in front of the giant screens. ...

"We are a technology-rich, advertising-fed, knowledge-poor society." 

Our society would function better, Sachs concludes, if many government services -- such as education, health, water treatment and road building -- were decentralized.

Sachs criticizes the "political Left" for routinely urging Washington "to impose its will on the entire country" on social issues such as: education policy, sexual mores, health care and income redistribution.

"These efforts have mostly backfired," he writes, and "often led to an anti-Washington backlash with no results at all."

Sachs ends with a positive look at the "millennial generation," Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 in 2010.

Today's Millennials, along with their younger brothers and sisters, are more willing to accept the growing diversity in our population and a more activist government.

Younger people, Sachs believes, are also far more attuned to the need to fix severe environmental problems which will threaten the very future of human existence.

 Their growing influence just might save us.

Reach Paul J. Nyden at pjny...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5164.